Students Recall Bush’s ‘My Pet Goat’ Reading

Posted on Sep 11, 2006

From the AP

The AP returns to the Sarasota, Fla., school where Bush learned the news of the 9/11 attacks while reading from a children’s book. “His face just started to turn red,” one student remembered. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.” Watch it.

Crooks and Liars:

Attywood:

His face just started to turn red,” said Tyler, now 13 and in seventh grade. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.”

For a puzzling seven minutes, the youngsters read aloud from the story “The Pet Goat” while the shaken president followed along in front of the class, trying to come to grips with what he had been told - that a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center and the nation was under terrorist attack.

“He looked like he was going to cry,” said Natalia Jones-Pinkney, now 12.

Those seven minutes are burned on my brain. I avoid the conspiracy theories not because I feel negatively about them but because I don’t want to send my imagination off creating down a false road. There’s no way to know what was going through Mr. Bush’s head that day, but I in truth, in my private mind, I have always thought since I watched him through those minutes, that what had happened was something he knew of as a possibility, that now was begun.